


Keep Talking

by Kedreeva



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Zombie Apocalypse, Alternate Universe - Zombies, Apocalypse, M/M, Post-Apocalypse, Post-Zombie Apocalypse, Zombie Apocalypse, Zombies, sterek
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-02-16
Updated: 2018-02-16
Packaged: 2019-03-19 05:58:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,043
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13698267
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kedreeva/pseuds/Kedreeva
Summary: Derek wakes up in a hospital with no memory of who he is or what has happened. A voice over the intercom introduces himself as Stiles and tells Derek if he wants to live, he needs to get up and get out.





	Keep Talking

 

 

 

 

            The first thing he became aware of was a dull ticking noise. He could feel it tapping into his skull, ticking deeper and deeper until he thought for sure it would come out the other side. He raised one hand to his head, pressing his palm into his temple. The motion didn’t stop the ticking, but it did lessen the pressure a little.

            When he lowered it, his hand came away sticky.

            He cracked one eye open, fingers spreading as he looked down.

            Blood.

            With a groan, he tipped his head back against the wall behind him and listened to the ticking for a few more minutes. He counted his breaths, his heartbeats, until he had summoned enough will to sit up.

            The world listed severely to one side and he closed his eyes until the dizziness passed. After a bit, he cracked open his eyes and squinted at his surroundings, trying to determine where he was. As he reached up to stabilize himself, his gaze caught on the white band around his wrist. Slowly, he settled back and brought his wrist closer to his face.

             _Hale, Derek_

            Below the name was a barcode, and a date, and a bunch of numbers that didn’t mean anything to him. He stared at the band for a while, longer than was probably necessary, trying to force the name to recall any sort of memory of what was going on or who he was. When his efforts failed to produce anything relevant, he replaced his hand on the wall and clambered to his feet.

            His balance swirled around like an excited bird, and he leaned against the wall until it stabilized. There was a stuffiness in his ears that it took him several minutes to place; it wasn’t that he couldn’t hear anything, it was that there was nothing to hear. An uneasy feeling settled in his belly.

            With hesitant steps, he shambled over to the closest set of windows, and peered out. Vertigo seized him as he looked down and down and down. He was high, so high, high enough that almost all he could see were rooftops. Smoke rose from a couple of them, and he could see damage on others.

            “What  _happened_?” he murmured. The glass was cool under his palm when he reached out to touch it.

            There was a crackle that broke the silence so violently Derek had to cover his ears, whipping around to find the source of the noise. Nothing moved, nothing shifted, and the sound cut off as quickly as it had begun. Carefully, Derek took his hands away from his ears. The world had returned to complete silence.

            “Hello?” he asked, hushed, hoping that whatever had caused the disruption would answer at the same decibel.

            There was another crackle, and then: “-human?”

            Derek blinked, eyes darting up to the intercom system near the ceiling. It was a small, beige box with a lot of little holes in it, one larger hole, and a small, blinking, red light. “Hello?” he repeated. “Is someone there?”

            There was a long pause and then a series of crackles. When they cleared, a tinny, male voice came through almost clearly. “Get out of the hallway,” it told him. “There is a wooden door three doors away from you on the left. Room 8536. Get there- they’re already coming.”

            “Who’s already coming?” Derek asked, unwilling to blindly follow directions like that. “Who are you?”

            “If you want to live, get to that room.” The com crackled decisively, and Derek knew there would be no further instructions until he got to that room.

            He braced himself against the wall and wobbled down the hallway until he reached the wooden door with a plaque that said  _8536_  beside it. The handle was sticky, but unlocked, and he closed the door behind him as quietly as he could. Inside, the room was mostly empty, except for a desk in the far left corner. Above it was another intercom, and after a moment the light on it lit up red.

            “Bottom drawer of the desk,” the voice crackled. “There’s a headset, on a charger. Put it on, and turn it on.”

            This time, the light on the intercom stayed on, and Derek stared at it for a few heartbeats before deciding it wasn’t going to continue until he had followed its instructions. He picked his way across the room along the wall, and sat down in the wheely chair behind the desk. There were two bottom drawers, and he opened them both. There was an empty charger in one and a headset in the other, as promised. The light on it was green. He disengaged it, and hooked the earpiece over his ear, adjusting the microphone until he could speak into it.

            “Good,” the voice said in his ear. It was smoother in the headset, almost normal, and Derek relaxed some. “To talk back, you have to press the button on the side of the earpiece.”

            Reaching up, Derek felt around until he found the little nub of a button on the earpiece. He pressed it, and heard a faint click as the input engaged. “Hello?”

            “Hi!” the voice said cheerfully. “My name’s Stiles, and it’s good to hear another human voice.”

            “Oh,” Derek said, not really sure how to respond. “My wristband says Hale, Derek.” There was a long pause, long enough that Derek thought maybe the connection had been lost. “Hello?”

            “I’m here,” Stiles said. “You don’t remember your own name, Derek?”

            “I don't remember _anything_ ,” Derek answered back testily. “I remember how to talk. And walk. But no, I don’t really remember anything about… what happened here.”

            “Long story short, you’re in a hospital,” Stiles said after another pause. “You’re on the eighth floor and there are about two hundred things ready to kill you between you and the outside.”

            “Oh,” Derek said, feeling like a broken record. He felt like maybe he was still unconscious, and this was just a really,  _really_ weird dream. “That doesn’t sound good.”

            “It’s not,” Stiles agreed. “Luckily, you have me. I can see you in the security cameras, which means I can also see  _them_  in the cameras, so I can help you get out, if you can listen to everything I tell you to do.”

            Derek thought about this for a few moments. He could choose to trust this unknown person, to trust that there even were undead creatures between him and the outside. He could follow his instructions, and maybe the guy would lead him out unharmed and maybe he wouldn’t. In the end, he decided that whatever happened, it would be better to have the company, at least.

            “Okay,” he said. “What do I have to do?”

            “Get out of this room, and head left down the hallway, until you see a stairwell on your right,” Stiles said, voice low even though he was using the headset instead of the intercom. “If you’re fast and quiet, you can get down two flights of stairs before you need to get out of the stairwell again.”

            “There aren’t any clear stairwells?” Derek asked, peeking around the doorjamb. The exit sign by the stairwell was only a few steps away. “Can’t I use an elevator?”

            “They’ll hear the elevator,” Stiles told him. “Just… tread lightly.”

            Containing his sigh, Derek rounded the corner and bolted for the red EXIT sign. The lights inside of it were dead, but it was there, hanging askew from the ceiling . His breath caught in his throat when he saw the hunched, shuffling creature milling around at the far end of the hall, close to where he had woken up.

            “What… is  _that_?” he breathed, hand coming up to cover his mouth.

            The silence thundered around inside Derek’s head for too long before Stiles answered. “You don’t… know?”

            “Don’t know?” Derek asked, incredulous, as he slipped out of sight into the stairs before the  _thing_  saw him. “How the hell would I know? I told you I don’t remember anything before you started talking to me.”

            “You know your name,” Stiles pointed out.

            “It’s on my fucking wristband,” Derek hissed. “It might not even be my name for all I know. Geezus. What was that thing?”

            “Zombie,” Stiles said plainly.

            “Bullshit,” Derek countered before he could say anything else.

            “It’s true,” Stiles replied. “They cropped up about two weeks ago, just…” Stiles’ voice broke, and Derek could hear a few sharp, harsh breaths. “They just… ravaged everything. A week in, there was almost nothing left. Everyone was dead or gone.”

            “You’re not,” Derek pointed out quietly, cocking his head to listen to the shuffling of the zombie outside in the hall. It didn’t appear to be moving closer or farther.

            “Yeah, I… I'm from somewhere safer,” he said. “I had a friend in this city. I'm looking for him. He… used to work in the hospital, with his mom.”

            Derek didn’t have to make any guesses; if Stiles was still there, he hadn’t found his friend yet. There was a good chance his friend was already dead, and less of a chance that he’d gotten out of the city alive. “So that’s why you’re watching the security cameras,” Derek surmised. “What’s his name?”

            “Scott,” Stiles replied softly. “His name was Scott. Is Scott.”

            “Okay,” Derek said. “Stiles, listen to me. I’ll help you look for him. But I need your help to get out of here so I can do that. I need to know what I’m walking into.”

            Derek listened to Stiles drawing breath in slowly and letting it out slowly for a few long moments. Then Stiles gave a sigh that sounded more final, and Derek leaned back against the wall to listen to him.

            “About- a little over two weeks ago, there was an infection. The first case was reported May 16th, but a lot more people started getting sick after that, like,  _really_  sick. They were spitting up black… goo. They said it was putrefied blood, like they were already dead. No one knew where it came from, and nothing any of the specialists did seemed to help. The first one died three days after it started… and then he came back.”

            “Alive?” Derek asked.

            “No. Undead. Like the thing you just saw,” Stiles said. “A small class came down to the morgue area for an autopsy viewing, and only one person made it out alive. That first zombie was just shambling around in the morgue loose. It killed two of them and bit three more, and they… changed. They say those four made it out into the hospital, and it was pretty much… chaos, after that.”

            “It didn’t take three days for the students to change?” Derek asked.

            “No,” Stiles said. “It changed them in just a few minutes, from what I’ve heard. The government didn’t have time to respond. The military didn’t even make it to the city until the whole thing was overrun.”

            “Which city was it?” He had a lot of questions about where it started, where it went, how fast it spread, had they contained it yet? But he also wanted to get out of the building, to where he could ask Stiles in person, somewhere safer.

            “This one,” Stiles said simply.

            Derek swallowed hard, looking down to the thin band around his wrist.  _Hale, Derek_  it read. “So the hospital where it started…?” he trailed off, not sure he wanted to hear that answer.

            “The one you’re in,” Stiles told him. Derek caught the whir of a video camera ticking down, and he glanced up to where Stiles was watching. “Can I ask you a question?”

            “Yeah,” Derek said, mouth dry. He hadn’t recognized the numbers before, but after hearing Stiles’ story, he knew what they meant.

            “I’ve been watching the hospital for almost three days now, and I’ve only seen zombies wandering around. No people,” Stiles said. “I thought, because I didn’t see you come in, that you’d wandered in overnight, while I was sleeping. But you… you were already inside, I think. So, I can’t help but wonder, Derek… what’s on your wristband?” Stiles finished quietly. “What’s the date?”

             _5-16-11_  Derek read.

            “May,” he breathed, eyes closing. “It says May sixteenth.”


End file.
